Leadership has become one of the fastest growing academic fields in higher education. At all levels, undergraduate through doctoral, an increasing number of colleges and universities have begun developing not only individual courses, but entire degree programs specifically devoted to the study of leadership.
Even among some of the more established and traditional academic disciplines such as engineering, education, and medicine, specialization and concentration areas have been developed around the study of leadership. Most of these academic programs have been designed to be multidisciplinary in nature—drawing upon theories and applications from related fields such as sociology, psychology, philosophy, and management. Such an approach, Rost (1991) has argued “allows scholars and practitioners to think radically new thoughts about leadership that are not possible from a unidisciplinary approach”.